1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains generally to learning to play stringed instruments and more particularly to a system and method for providing multimedia instruction for learning how to play musical pieces for a guitar, bass guitar (generally referred to simply as a “bass” by guitarists), or similar stringed instruments which is played by hand, or using a pick.
2. Description of the Background Art
There are approximately ten million people in the United States who play guitar. After acquiring the basic skills such as how to hold, tune, play chords, and strum, the vast majority of individuals invest significant time trying to learn to play all or parts of songs that they have heard and enjoyed.
In order to learn to play all, or a portion, of various guitar musical pieces, guitar players have historically relied on a variety of teaching tools and resources. Skilled guitarists able to hear a piece and immediately figure out what was played, and how it was played are rare individuals. For most guitar players, the ability to hear, deconstruct, and replicate by ear the performance of another guitarist is very difficult, wherein they must rely on other resources for learning a new piece of guitar music. Those resources typically involve a combination that may include lessons from teachers or friends, books, videos, audiotapes, software, and, more recently, web based lessons. These learning approaches can be readily grouped into interactive and non-interactive categories.
The interactive category involves being tutored by the teacher on how to perform the guitar piece, wherein the student watches the teacher, asks questions, attempts to duplicate the notes and playing techniques while receiving feedback and encouragement from the instructor. Students typically are able to learn a piece more readily using interactive learning methods than with non-interactive “book learning”. However, interactive learning has a number of disadvantages, including cost, scheduling time, location, finding a competent teacher that has mastered the pieces of interest, lesson structure, communication difficulties between student and teacher. Guitarists wanting to learn may seek out guitar playing friends to teach them a new piece. However, similar instructor related issues arise and in many cases the ability to play a piece is not indicative of an ability to instruct a student to play the piece.
The less effective non-interactive approach involves reading, watching, or listening to others explain how to play the piece. This approach generally does not involve feedback, although recently, there have been some attempts at creating software applications that confirm whether the student has played the notes or chords correctly. There are many resources for this type of teaching and each has its own style and approach. However, all (with the exception of pure audio instruction) rely on presenting material that illustrates the music. In other words, non-interactive approaches illustrate some representation of the notes, chords, and techniques required to play all or part of a song. The presentation of the notes, chords, and techniques has been historically accomplished by depicting standard notation, chord diagrams, tablature, and more recently, virtual fretboards. All of these techniques have significant shortcomings that reduce their overall effectiveness.
Standard Notation
Conventional music notation, or standard notation, was derived from vocal music in the Middle Ages. It will be recognized that as the human voice produces one note at a time, it is considered generally monophonic. Standard notation was created for representing music for monophonic instruments, along with some polyphonic instruments, such as pianos and organs. Standard notation is commonly seen when taking piano lessons and conveys the notes and tempo for instruments that have only one way to play a particular note.
Chord Diagrams and the Guitar
The guitar is a true polyphonic instrument, with multiple simultaneous notes which may each be played in a variety of ways. Notation for guitar is generally represented in the form of chord diagrams, which are pictures of chords in which a particular fingering is utilized when multiple strings are struck, picked, plucked, or strummed. Chord diagrams represent where to press down on the strings along a guitar neck to play a collection of notes that represent the chord. Thousands of chord diagrams exist and they do not provide for representing individual notes, the sequence of notes, transitioning in or out of the chord, or the tempo.
Music for a guitar represent a unique challenge for a notation system because not only is it polyphonic, but a number of ways exist for playing any one note. Having to make a selection on where to play a particular pitch on a guitar is not the exception, but the rule. Notational confusion can arise in that one can play the same scale (identical pitches) using a number of different combinations of locations, positions, and fingerings on the guitar fretboard. Standard musical notation as well as chord diagrams are inadequate for conveying the information contained in a piece of guitar music.
Tablature
Tablature was created as a notation for stringed instruments to overcome a number of these shortcomings. Tablature for a guitar comprises six lines which represent the guitar strings, and numbers for representing fret positions along those strings.
Tablature Provides:
                Indication on which notes to play-string to strike and fret to play it with.        Hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends, slides, harmonics and vibrato.        Tuning for the piece.        Information on use of capos and so forth.        Rhythm of the piece (long notes versus short notes).If the tuning information is not given explicitly, then normal tuning may be assumed.Tablature does not Provide:        Note lengths (aside from standard rhythmic notation).        Which fingers to fret which note.        Information about picking and strumming.        User determines whether upstrokes/downstrokes.        Easy to read notation.        How to finger and execute bending, vibrato, and so forth.        Symbols in tablature are difficult to read and provide no information on nuances.        
It will be appreciated therefore, that conventional tablature is a helpful representation system, however, it is incapable of conveying the information necessary for properly and rapidly learning a piece of guitar music. As indicated, since note lengths are not provided, the user will generally need to listen to the song themselves, with the tablature in front of them, and work out the rhythm of the notes being played. Although some tablature formats provide standard rhythmic notation, (i.e. quarter notes, eighth notes, and so forth, built into or displayed above it) this is often of limited value insofar as a limited percentage of guitarists are capable of reading music. It is difficult with conventional tablature to correlate sight with sound in learning a guitar piece. One of the difficulties of understanding tablature, is that it is out of context with the accompanying music, wherein the symbols utilized in tablature may be more readily understood when the associated music is heard as well as being seen in the tablature form. Correlating sight with sound allows the student to quickly pick up and remember how long a bend lasts, how much the note is bent, whether there is vibrato added to the bend, and a number of other related playing metrics.
Aside from being deficient with regard to indicating “how” notes are to be played, conventional tablature does not provide indications of “why” the notes are being played. This “why” can be thought of in different ways: (1) visually since the notes in a chord, scale, riff, and so forth form a visual pattern, and after repeated exposure an individual begins recognizing common visual patterns shared between musical pieces, or (2) aurally since it is common practice to add “flavor” to different chords, scales, and so forth by playing notes not usually found in the chord or scale, (3) in addition to the “why” of guitar playing, the “why” of music in general.
The use of conventional tablature does not teach the user about music theory, such as recognition of note names, degrees of the scale, different scales, modes, inversions, interactivity, slowing down, looping, and so forth.
Although some computer music applications now display a virtual fretboard on a computer monitor with lights and often numbers to indicate fingering, they do not indicate timing or technique, wherein the student is required to experiment or to work closely with an instructor familiar with the piece.
Commercial teaching programs (i.e. Voyetra Teach Me Guitar™, eMedia guitar method™) can provide limited on-screen animated tablature as an instructional tool. The display within these applications render six horizontal lines representing guitar strings and vertical lines representing frets, with dots appearing on the strings and frets to indicate fingering. The tools, however, provide no means for conveying information on how the notes are to be played, such as downstroke/upstroke, bending, slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs, muting, and other techniques. In addition, these systems lack means for creating and composing content for their particular display technique. Although MIDI data may be received in a limited capacity by these tablature systems, they generally only display pieces which are either built into the software package, or encoded by the software developer in a proprietary format.
Sequencers:
Other popular software packages (i.e. Cakewalk Guitar Studio™), being referred to as “sequencers” read MIDI data from a file, or in real time, from a MIDI enabled device, and may provide tools for electronically composing music. Amongst these tools is a tablature translator that receives music written in standard notation and converts it to tablature for guitars. The tablature notation used in “Cakewalk Guitar Studio” is similar to that of the teaching programs and remains generally lacking in features for representing specialized playing techniques.
Enhanced Tablature:
There also exist programs that enable a user to manually edit tablature files to include specialized playing notation such as bar lines, single and double repeats, hammer-ons, pull-offs, slide up/down, dead notes, vibrato, ghost notes, bends, time signatures, tempo markers, tap, slap/pop, text, above and below staves, paragraph text, rhythmic notation, including dotted notes and triplets. One such program, Bucket O' Tab™, is freely distributed on the Internet. This and others programs with similar capabilities, however, are limited to creating and editing the tablature manually, most do not read MIDI files directly and have no interface capabilities with MIDI instruments. Presently, tablature files can not be automatically created that include fingering information, timing information, and other metrics associated with the hand motions of the musician. Currently, the creation of enhanced tablature files is performed by manually editing the tablature files after capture by having a trained musician analyze the music and edit the files to include the enhanced information.
Guitar to Tablature Interfaces:
Patents such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,970,935 by Bonano, issued 1987 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,270,475 by Weiss, issued 1993 describe various hardware implementations of extracting pitch (pitch tracking) and timing from the guitar and sending that information to the computer. These patents attempt to distinguish themselves from guitars that have switch inputs on the fretboard by stating that their guitars are stringed musical instruments while these other implementations are not. The switch activated patents distinguish themselves by stating that they can determine exact finger position by sensing where the strings have been manipulated. It should be appreciated, however, that the feedback still does not convey the use of the hands by the musician, or the subtleties of technique in the way the musician plays the piece.
Therefore, a need exists for a multimedia guitar instruction system that provides a multimedia output according to how the musician played the given piece of music, and which does not require manually entering information as to how the piece was played. The present invention satisfies those needs, as well as others, and overcomes the deficiencies of previously developed guitar instructional software.